

It’s a good sign that there was enough of a backlash to cause the company to put some clothes on the soldiers. This about-face - well, half-about-face - is an interesting moment in the ongoing effort to dislodge misogyny from gaming. On Wednesday a spokeswoman from the company sent me an e-mail saying that it would be changing the female characters to non-scantily clad versions in the North American, European, and Turkish versions of the game, but not in Russia, China, and Korea.

It appears that this wasn’t the reaction Crytek hoped for. Instead, news of the skimpily dressed characters - and the fact that Crytek explicitly reached out to its players for help in designing them - raced around the gaming media, drawing headlines like the one on Eurogamer that read “Female soldiers in Warface are unrealistic and sexualised because community wanted it.” The company probably figured its fan base was so male-heavy that the ridiculous female characters would be welcomed and drooled over. Even though the different outfits don’t reflect any in-game differences in survivability, it’s been hard not to be reminded of the feminist game critic Anita Sarkeesian’s complaints that female characters are often little more than hyper-sexualized cannon-fodder.Ĭrytek must have understood the message it was sending big video game companies aren’t stupid. Think about this from the point of view of a female gamer: What would it tell you that the female characters in “Warface” are running around in skimpy outfits that would offer very little protection in real life from bullets or explosive flak, but plenty of eye candy for the men fighting around them? What would it suggest about who the game is created by and for? But “Warface” takes place in a gritty, worn-down near-future world, a bullet-ravaged place where, as the game’s website puts it, a “ruthless military force, known as Blackwood, controls the world’s resources and turns cities and countries into desolate battlefields.” It’s always strange to see female characters doing heroic things while dressed skimpily, but here it’s positively jarring. Of course, provocatively dressed female characters are common in many games set in rollicking fantasy or adventure settings. Up to and including running round in high heels which is just silly, right?” Crytek nixed the idea of high heels but went ahead with the revealing models.

“They were very comfortable with the fact we have these very realistic-looking men,” he said of the game’s players, “but they wanted the women to be not what we would think of as realistic at all. I apologize if this post had grammatical errors and that it might look like an article of some sort.The female characters were designed after Crytek solicited feedback from its players as to how they should look, as “Warface” executive producer Joshua Howard explained in a recent interview with Wired. What do you think of the Female characters lost in Warface NA? Is a return a must or a bust? Now, for a little participation from the community.

Here's a little proof from the current build. Though the question still stands, Will the female characters return to Warface at one point in time or will it be a memory from the past. Whether she is accepted or denied by the society. In the end, implementing a FeMC to a game is a gamble. It is understandable that the female gaming community is growing and the addition of the female characters was targeting the male gamer demographic but is the removal the correct answer? I might be bringing up a very controversial topic here but back in the beta days, when the game is only available in GFace, Female characters(which I will abbreviate to FeMC) were included in the game, which later caused an uproar in the community and they were removed from Warface at one point in Beta.įor those who does not know why they were removed, the character models for the female counterparts of each class were considered as over-sexualised(Though what sparked the issue might be the Female Sniper Class).
